New Horizons Returns Photos of Hazy 'Arctic' Pluto
As NASA's New Horizons mission zipped past Pluto and its system of moons on July 14, it carried out an automated, choreographed routine of rapid data gathering. Looking back at the dwarf planet, after closest approach, with dim sunlight scattering through its hazy atmosphere, the spacecraft glimpsed one of the most stunning photos in space history: Pluto blocking the sun, creating a enigmatic view of the tiny world's atmospheric halo.
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Today, in new images released by the New Horizons team, perhaps an even more captivating scene has been realized. While looking back, shortly after flyby from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers), the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC) zoomed into a crescent Pluto, through its atmospheric haze, revealing a very "arctic"-looking mountainous landscape.
"This image really makes you feel you are there, at Pluto, surveying the landscape for yourself," said Alan Stern, New Horizons Principal Investigator, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "But this image is also a scientific bonanza, revealing new details about Pluto's atmosphere, mountains, glaciers and plains."
The haze speaks not of a frozen, static environment - there's some incredibly dynamic processes going on that we have only just started to fathom.
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"In addition to being visually stunning, these low-lying hazes hint at the weather changing from day to day on Pluto, just like it does here on Earth," said Will Grundy, lead of the New Horizons Composition team from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Ariz.
Weather? Yes, weather.
As we dive into the vast array of observations gradually being streamed back from New Horizons after its close encounter, we're seeing a complex Pluto that is way more dynamic than we ever dreamed. Before the New Horizons encounter, astronomers knew the dwarf planet possessed some kind of atmosphere, but after seeing Pluto's surface, evidence is building around this hazy atmosphere cycling exotic ices from the surface and into the atmosphere - akin to Earth's hydrological cycle.
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Pluto's relatively "new" surface, featuring what appears to be active ice flows like glaciers, suggest the ices are being replenished by deposition from the atmsophere, a finding that no one would have bet on before July 14.
"We did not expect to find hints of a nitrogen-based glacial cycle on Pluto operating in the frigid conditions of the outer solar system," said Alan Howard, of the mission's Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. "Driven by dim sunlight, this would be directly comparable to the hydrological cycle that feeds ice caps on Earth, where water is evaporated from the oceans, falls as snow, and returns to the seas through glacial flow."
"Pluto is surprisingly Earth-like in this regard," added Stern, "and no one predicted it."
For more information about how these stunning views were accomplished, see the New Horizons mission pages.
15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft looked back toward the sun and captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto’s horizon.
After several false starts, NASA in 2001 agreed to fund an independent effort to fly a spacecraft to Pluto, the only member of the solar system’s original nine planets that hadn’t been explored. Five years later, New Horizons blasted off to begin a nearly 3 billion mile journey to Pluto, farther than any probe has traveled since the 1970s-era Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft.
Here’s a look at the New Horizons mission by the numbers.
Launching a small spacecraft on a big rocket is one way to get going fast. Slingshotting off giant Jupiter’s gravity is another. New Horizons did both, and still the journey to distant Pluto took nearly 10 years. It is zipping along at about 31,000 mph -- fast enough to fly from New York City to Los Angeles in less than 5 minutes.
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Image: Viewed from the top of the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft roars off the launch pad aboard an Atlas V rocket on Jan. 19, 2006.
At its closest approach, New Horizons will pass about 7,750 miles from Pluto and about 17,900 miles from its orbital mate Charon. The view will be about 500 times better than this image, taken on July 7 when New Horizons was just less than 5 million miles from Pluto. New Horizons will pass through the Pluto system in about 30 minutes. The probe carries seven science instruments, including LORRI, the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, telescope.
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During the encounter, New Horizons will take hundreds of pictures in both visible and near-infrared wavelengths. The best images should depict surface features as small as 200 feet across. With nearly 3 billion miles between New Horizons and Earth, a radio signal, which travels at the speed of light, will take about 4.5 hours to reach Earth.
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Image: An artist's impression of Pluto's surface reveals an icy surface -- we're about to find out what Pluto is really made of.
With just one shot to get a close-up view of Pluto, New Horizons is designed to gather as much data as possible, as quickly as possible. In all, scientists expect the spacecraft to collect 100 times more data during closest approach than it can transmit back to Earth just after the encounter. A few high-priority images and data will be sent back just before and after closest approach, but the rest will trickle in over the next 16 months.
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Image: Diagram showing the sequence of events during New Horizons' encounter with the Pluto system.
New Horizons draws electricity from a single radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, which converts heat given off by the natural decay of about 24 pounds of radioactive plutonium. It runs on less power than a pair of 110-watt light bulbs.
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Image: Artist's impression of New Horizons flying past Jupiter, with its RTG visible in the lower right of the image.
After its Pluto flyby, New Horizons will continue out into the Kuiper Belt region of the solar system. Scientists hope to extend its mission so it can pass by at least one of the thousands of icy bodies that orbit in this vast domain. Eventually, New Horizons will end up leaving the solar system. It is expected to remain viable until the late 2030s.
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Image: Artist's impression of New Horizons encountering a Kuiper Belt object beyond Pluto.